Of course, it is worth noting in this context that the body count created by cocaine is at least partially composed of persons who die as a result of illegally trafficking of the substance. There are the drug lords, the pushers, and the dealers, who enter into ultimately fatal encounters with each other or with law enforcement officers; and there are the law enforcement personnel themselves who di…
By the time crack appeared on the scene, the federal government had long been engaged in a massive "War on Drugs." The cause came increasingly to public attention during the 1980s, when First Lady Nancy Reagan took it up, and promoted it with the slogan "Just Say No." The latter injunction was geared mostly toward children, who were often vulnerable not only to peer pressure, but to the persuasion…
This was not the first or only "War on Drugs": "The late 1800s," as James Bovard noted in Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, "saw a national panic over opium, orchestrated in part by U.S. labor unions fearful of low-wage Chinese competition." In fact a number of these drug wars, in the view of Bovard and other critics of federal policy, have had a racial or xenophobic component. Ins…
A more recent chapter in the saga of drugs and race came in the mid-1990s, with proposals to make penalties for crack sales and usage much higher than those for cocaine. Civil Rights leaders decried this initiative as racist, citing the fact that whereas most cocaine users are white and middle class, the majority of crack users are poor and African American. Advocates of the sentencing laws, by co…
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments